[Mesa-dev] Mesa/Gallium overall design

[Jesse Barnes]

On Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:36:13 +0200
Michel Dänzer <michel at daenzer.net> wrote:
> > Moving to Gallium would be a huge effort for us.  We've invested a lot
> > into the current drivers, stabilizing them, adding features, and
> > generally supporting them.  If we moved to Gallium, much of that effort
> > would be thrown away as with any large rewrite, leaving users in a
> > situation where the driver that worked was unsupported and the one that
> > was supported didn't work very well (at least for quite some time).  
> 
> This may be true now, but only because you guys refused to pick up
> Gallium early on. That's what I was referring to, the technical reasons
> above are merely consequences of that decision IMHO.

No, it was true even as the first Gallium code was landing in the
repo.  Rewriting everything is always painful, and we already had
plenty of other tasks to keep us busy (see Dave's mail) and cause pain
for everyone.  In hindsight, maybe it wouldn't have been any worse than
what we went through, but since the 3D driver is the biggest part of
the stack, throwing away that part seemed like it would be the biggest
amount of work.

Dave's other points are also good ones; Gallium has yet to be proven
with a big, open source, shipping, and supported driver.  I won't
comment on the closed source stuff; I've heard things but haven't
actually worked on it myself, so I have no idea whether there were good
closed source drivers released or not.

-- 
Jesse Barnes, Intel Open Source Technology Center